When I was putting together the last AECR social action project, a PR adviser suggested that we should find a discreet way to exclude Nigel Evans from the British contingent. Although nothing had been proved against him, she argued, the charges were so nasty that the other MPs risked being tainted by association.

I got pretty cross. So, I’m pleased to say, did Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the Conservative Vice-Chairman who was co-organising the project. The presumption of innocence, we told her, was no mere piety. Nigel Evans was an elected parliamentarian, a valued colleague and – for what it was worth – a friend.

Nigel duly came with us to the Syrian refugee camp and wielded his paintbrush alongside everybody else. Still – and I am slightly ashamed to write this – a little part of me wondered whether there might be something in the accusations, implausible as they seemed. If I, who had known the man for twenty years, felt a tiny batsqueak of doubt, what must the general public, always ready to believe the worst of MPs, have thought?

Put yourself, for a moment, in Nigel’s place. He has seen his reputation traduced, and vile accusations relayed in our national media. He has lost the Deputy Speakership (and its salary) and used up his life savings on lawyers’ bills. He has spent eleven unbelievably stressful months wondering whether he might end up on a sex offenders’ wing. And all because of charges that should never have come to court, and that fell apart almost immediately.

Who scrambled this decent man’s life? Part of the blame, of course, rests with his accuser, but the criminal justice system is supposed to screen out frivolous and malicious claims. A greater share must rest with the police and, above all, the Crown Prosecution Service. I really can’t improve on Dan Hodges’s account of how the CPS went to unusual lengths to beef up an intrinsically weak case.

Equality before the law is fundamental to our freedom. Treating MPs or celebrities with undue severity is every bit as wrong as showing them undue leniency. Yet, not for the first time, a quango with the subjective power to wreck the existence of guiltless people seems to have abused its power.

Our fathers called such concentrations of power “arbitrary rule”. It was as a reaction that they developed systems of representative government. If the Levellers could be transported to our own age, or the Wilkesites, or the American Founders (who, of course, grew up thinking of themselves as British), they would advocate the democratisation of the CPS. They would want decisions on when to prosecute to be made by accountable representatives, not remote officials. They would see an elected shrievalty as elemental to freedom. What a sad comment on our generation that we shrink from democratic responsibility, and actively want to entrust our liberty to capricious bureaucrats.

We are curiously reluctant to trust ourselves as voters. The Maria Miler case has led, inevitably and cretinously, to demands for stricter controls on MPs. There needs, we are told, to be an external regulator – in other words, a quango that can strike down the decisions of the electorate.

It’s depressing that I have to spell this out but, in a democracy, we are the external regulator. The question of whether an MP has behaved properly shouldn’t be left to a panel of worthies; it should be determined by his or her constituents at the ballot box.

You might fairly object that the power of the electorate is more theoretical than actual, at least in safe seats. But the way to tackle that problem is through recall mechanisms, of the kind advocated by Zac Goldsmith and Douglas Carswell, and through open primaries.

It’s bad enough that policy makers should respond to a loss of popular confidence by proposing to weaken democratic accountability; it’s tragic that they should do so with evident public support.

Do we truly prefer unelected functionaries to elected politicians? Do we have such scant confidence in ourselves? What fools our fathers were if this be true.